


The Opposite of Answered

by Catchclaw



Series: Mental Mimosa [309]
Category: Captain America (Movies), James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: Crossover, M/M, MI6 Meets SHIELD, Partnership
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-11
Updated: 2019-09-11
Packaged: 2020-10-14 13:30:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20601596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catchclaw/pseuds/Catchclaw
Summary: Bond has no desire to work with S.H.I.E.L.D. He doesn't get a choice.





	The Opposite of Answered

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: [**THIS**](https://catchclaw.tumblr.com/post/187601556347/thedarkcaustic-luvinchris-chris-evans-daniel).

“He’s not one of ours.”

“Meaning what?”

Felix chuckled and tugged out another cigarette. “Meaning that he generally hangs out with a different set of shady characters than you and I do, James. He’s one of Nick Fury’s boys.”

The headache that had been crouching behind Bond’s eyes all day sat up and stretched with a roar. “You’re pawning me off on S.H.I.E.L.D, Felix?" he said, incredulous. "What the hell did I ever do to you?” 

“I was just as surprised as you are, believe me. It wasn’t my call.”

"Christ."

Felix's eyebrows lifted over the bright tip. “A little birdy told me you’ve worked with Fury before.”

“Once. Just bloody once. That all parties emerged with limbs intact is something of a miracle.”

“Job go bad?”

“From Fury’s perspective, no.”

“And from yours?”

Bond swept back the last of his scotch. “Let’s just say I made it extraordinarily clear to the powers that be back home that they’d be well served never to put me in such a position again.”

Felix signaled for the bartender and pointed at Bond’s empty glass. “Well, my friend, it looks like your prayers have been the opposite of answered.”

“Apparently.”

“But, if it’s any consolation, I know this Rogers guy. He’s good. Ex-military. Enormous but surprisingly stealthy. Not one of the regular S.H.I.E.L.D showboating types. He won’t talk your ear off about aliens he’s killed or sea monsters he’s wrestled or any of that other bullshit."

“Well,” Bond grumbled. The stale smell of last call and the absolute cock-up of it all made his temples throb. "That’s something, at least.”

****  


The meet was set for 10 am at the Cloud Gate in Chicago. The sunlight and the happy Sunday crowds--never mind the splashing, shrieking children--did nothing to improve Bond’s mood.

He normally liked working in America; he didn’t get to do it often. The Company lads had never been particularly eager to throw open their turf to anybody, even those who were ostensibly friends, and in the last decade, their tightfistedness had become only more pronounced. He’d spent more time with Leiter in Prague and Sao Paulo than he ever had in the States. Most of his colleagues on the other side of the Atlantic would have considered that a blessing, not a curse.

But there was something about the vastness of the US that appealed to Bond, the sheer volume of it: the great plains and the rivers, the tight clusters of the cities, the sky. No wonder its denizens were such fans of excess; they were surrounded by it, steeped in it, so much so that they were blind to it, too. Their openness fascinated him, their sometimes inexplicable propensity to smile at strangers on the street. Their anger, he’d found, could be just as quickly expressed when given the right impetus. In America, more so in nearly every country in the world, emotion lay so close to the surface that it seemed all you had to do was reach out and touch.

Which was why the Americans were the only ones who could’ve come up with an outfit as ostentatious as S.H.I.E.L.D., an organization founded, so far as Bond was concerned, on a frankly ridiculous set of fears. Pakistani extremists getting hold of a nuke or the Russians reclaiming Alaska or climate change, for fuck’s sake--those were the kinds of things one should be afraid of. Not invasion from the outer regions of the galaxy or murderous robots or gods who walked among men. Humans were perfectly capable of orchestrating their own destruction; they didn’t need any assistance from a _ deux ex machina _ or a flying man in a gaudy red suit.

“Look,” Fury had said twenty years before, knee deep in a Bosnian graveyard, “you’re a dinosaur, Bond. Or you will be, soon. Believe me, man, there’s shit so far out there that’s happening all around us that you can’t even fucking fathom. You really think that this is as bad as it gets? A localized genocide? Pfffft. Bond, the crap that my people deal with day to day are on the scale of extinction level events--as in multiple on a weekly basis.”

“Really? Then how come I’ve never heard of any of them?”

“Because you and the fellas at Langley aren’t looking for them. Your eyes are trained on a different place, and that’s ok. That’s good, in my book. Because there’s plenty of shit to be shoveled and no reason we all gotta dig in the same place.”

Bond had swept his hands at the carnage around them: mud and bones, the evidence of pointless suffering. “You were sure there were extraterrestrials involved in this, weren’t you?”

“I was.”

“Well,” Bond had snarled, “there fucking aren’t. Just people, Fury. Just goddamned terrified people who bought some bullshit about ‘ethnic cleansing.’ We’ve seen that movie before, eh? And look what the sequel has wrought.”

The look in Fury’s eyes had been almost pitying. “You don’t have to believe me, Bond. It’s ok if you don’t. You’re a smart guy, though; I thought you deserved to hear the truth. Whether you believe it or not is entirely up to you.”

Now, parked on a bench at the center of a living city, it was too easy for Bond to imagine the paving stones pulled and the giant video screens lying in ruins. Blood everywhere. The hollow echo of screams. It wouldn’t take aliens to get them there; all it would take was a bomb. A few pounds of explosive, some radiation or smallpox mixed in, and someone like him failing to stop it, to even see it coming, and--

He sat back and pulled at his tea, grimaced. Fuck. It never tasted right in a paper cup.

“The sun’s higher than it usually is, isn’t it?”

A shadow fell across his lap. Bond looked up.

“There’s something about fall that throws the angle off, I’m told.”

“Ah,” the man said. “That’s funny, isn’t it? Since astrologically, it's still summer.”

“Mr. Rogers,” Bond said, the ritual completed.

The man smiled and sat down beside him. “Mr. Bond. Nice to meet you.”


End file.
